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Admin
I mean okay, it's a bit of technical debt, but this is exactly the sort of thing you want to be catching and fixing as a nice early "first project" surely?
Admin
So "Alien" is more than one person (reference to by "they")? And where is the easy reader version ?
Admin
Don't you know the "red - green - create-symlink" cycle of CDD (Confusion Driven Development)?
Admin
long story short there were more than 6k relative symlinks in our project, now that quantity went under 2k
Admin
nice thing is that there's already a suitable name for it just from how it's done: "symbolic code reuse" =D
Admin
This type of symlink organization was quite common in the 80's and 90's... it has largely fallen out of favor. I remember well executing the following 4 lines and regularly getting completely different outputs from the "pwd"... unsettling until one realized that the directory/file structure was a directed graph rather and a tree.
What I find surprising is that "grabbed the code from git"... created the symlink in the first place... (or did some part of the build script do it????)
Admin
Without seeing the projects, it's hard to say. The code could have been well structured but placed into the wrong project. That's not a hard fix. The hard fix is finding that common code copied and pasted across 20 projects in 15 different spots per project.
I'm dealing with some shit now. Fixing a real cluster something. Need access to a field in a class? Oh, just make it public static and assume that the class is only instantiated once and prior to you ever needing that variable. #%(^@Q%
Admin
No unicorns? No Easy Reader version. Who really wrote this?!?! It sure wasn't Remy.
Admin
Depending on language, there are some pretty good tools out there for finding code clones... They operate at the semantic rather than lexical level and often reveal unintentional cloning of common patterns as well as raw copy/paste...
Admin
Mild, compared to some of the code I'm peripherally involved with ...
Admin
"They" can be used for singular in English, particularly in cases when gender isn't specified.
Admin
You beat me to it. I went looking for comments and an easy reader version, but couldn't find them. I was sad.
Admin
"Code Reuse"? I think you dropped a letter there, this was probably "Code Refuse" not as in refusal, but as in trash.
Admin
Woohoo, I learned something new today :-) The English language just got a but more confusing :-(
Admin
Been there, hoovered up that...
Symbolic links are nasty. Symbolic links when you're using branches? VERY nasty...
Admin
I think English should be refactored due to this not even symbolically linked pronoun reuse.
Admin
This is what happens when you let a dirty hack become common practice. "They" is and always has been a plural pronoun, but some people started using it as a singular one because they couldn't abide the idea of using a default (usually "him") and considered it less awkward than using "him/her" or putting some effort into refactoring the whole statement to avoid use of pronouns altogether. And now you know :P
Admin
@Brian - "they" as a singular was common in the 14th to 17th century. Pushback began in the late 19th century. -- All well before the "him/her" topic was ever relevant.
Admin
The problem with "They" vs Him or Her or Him/Her wasn't because of bad practice, it was because of cases where gender wasn't known (Particularly where you know that there IS a gender, but don't know what it is, so you don't want to use "it" either). That case never had a proper solution in common English. The technically correct thing to do is refer to "That [Noun]" or "One" or "He/She/Him/Her". If you are pointing at a person from behind, so you don't know their gender, but you know that they (probably) have one, which of the following sounds correct:
"They are stealing!" -> Technically a misuse, both because you are using "are" for a singular, and because of the misuse of "they", but has become colloquially correct due to common use.
"He/She is stealing!" -> A horrid mouthful.
"That person is stealing!" -> The most correct form, but still adds an additional word that should not be necessary. Requires that you know what the noun is that you are referring to, but if you don't know that then you can't be certain that the thing has a gender, so the next line becomes completely correct.
"It is stealing!" -> Technically correct, as it would be used in cases of unknown gender, but trust me, someone is going to get offended, and it just sounds wrong.
Admin
That's not quite true. In Middle English (the 14th Century was still in the time of Middle English, thanks), the two pronouns "he" and "they" were both spelled "he"(1), although the verb conjugation was a big giveaway of which was meant(2). When talking about a single person, the usage was singular, and when talking about several, it was plural.
(1) See for example the Western Michigan University Press(3) edition of four of the stories in "The Matter of England". https://arc-humanities.org/products/f-70111-111110-82-8244/
(2) There is still (just) enough conjugation in English verbs for us to tell, at least in the present tense, but there was a lot more in Middle English.
(3) No, I'm not kidding. WMU is a fairly important centre of academic research in Mediaeval literature and related subjects.
Admin
No. More properly, you should use the second meaning of "he": "person of unknown and/or unspecified sex".
Yes, "he" is two different pronouns: "male person" and "person of unknown and/or unspecified sex". Telling them apart is not automatically easy, and somewhere along the way, ignorance took over and people forgot and/or were never taught that the second meaning exists.
Admin
@Steve_The_Cynic : yes, that used to be the rule of grammar, but people (of both cisgenders, which was all we understood at the time) correctly pointed out that this was part of a patriarchal set of language rules. Like it or not, use of masculine form for all unknown instantiations is part of the paradigm which claims that females are not recognized as equal to males. Personally, I would prefer "it" to "they," but I also prefer "they" to "xe," "he/she," "s/he," or other abominations.
Admin
Just my opinion, but i'd much rather prefer using "they" for unspecified gender than invent a completely new pronoun, or whatever crazy concoction these so-called "gender" "studies" "experts" come up this week.
Admin
Admin
Absolutely nobody wants "he/she" or, god forbid, "s/he", especially the people pushing for more gender-inclusive language.
Admin
Absolutely nobody wants "he/she" or, god forbid, "s/he", especially the people pushing for more gender-inclusive language.
Admin
Interestingly (or not), the wild over-use of symlinks as part of the build process was highlighted back in the 1990s by Jamie Zawinski whilst trying to rebuild X-Windows from scratch. (I can't find a link, so you're just going to have to look up the relevant chapter of the Unix Hater's Handbook.)
This one isn't even close to that monstrosity. Not only is it possible to build the system from scratch (quite important, that), but all you're really seeing is the inclusion of a couple of extra libraries being included for no good reason. There's no copypasta, so it's not even as though the implementations can diverge.
Now, don't get me started on rancid MVC implementations where parts of the C are in the M, most of the M that you need to work with are inaccessible from the V, and each of the three gets ill-defined keyboard/mouse input that they are supposed to redirect to one of the other two but don't actually have a defined protocol to do so... That, my friend, is real pain.
Admin
Ahh, that's because in English we use second person plural instead of second person singular, because it sounds less biblical.
Admin
Ahem. The correct usage is "shkle" instead of "he" or "her" and "shklim" instead of "him" or "her".
Admin
The correct usage is "he/she/it" but nobody seems to like that one at all. Say it a few times real fast. ;)
English lacks a gender-neutral singular personal pronoun. "It" is a pronoun for a thing, not a person.
Admin
@Steve_The_Cynic : Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Woolf - All used "they" and/or "their" in the singular...
Admin
I've rarely had a job where I don't run across this kind of reuse. "Alien" must have been hiding out on Mars.
Admin
It's either that "Alien" and boss were working together, or someone was being timid with pronouns. I hate it when on Hackaday, someone is obviously male and yet they (referring to Hackaday authors in plural) refer to the singular male as "they". Respect their (plural) pronouns, bro! Using "they" in a singular context is as annoying as Grocer's Apostrophe's.
Also, TRWTF is the lack of comments and cornify in a Remy article. I ran my bookmarklet twice, then did a view source just to be sure.
Admin
Soon enough, making the distinction between "thing" and "person" may become both difficult and prone to discrimination, and a neutral alternative will be needed.
Admin
It's a fractal of discrimination. there is no end.
Admin
Which is also why this quest to "neutralize" the language will ultimately fail, because you get an ever growing group of reactionary "hold on, it was fine how it was, why change it?" and an ever fracturing group of "<X> is not enough, because it doesn't cover <Y>". and the reactionaries will always win this.
Admin
Just contract it to
s/he/it…Admin
Everyone calls yo momma "they" because she's as heavy as three people
Admin
What?! A Remy post with no unicorns? What's the world come to?
Admin
No it doesn't. "He" is a gender neutral singular personal pronoun and has been for centuries.
Admin
"they" has been used as a singular indeterminate gender for longer than modern English has been around.
Admin
"He" is putatively gender-neutral, but writers and scholars have long since demonstrated that it actually isn't. If it were, a sentence like "Any girl who is currently on his period is excused from gym" would sound fine. "They", on the other hand, is gender-neutral and demonstrably used with singular referents since the 14th century.
Steve_the_Cynic's claim that the early examples are merely a coincidence of spelling between "they" and "he" in Middle English is wrong. For one thing, we're not just looking for usage of "they", but also for "them", "their", "themselves", etc.
Admin
Especially when deleted on a shared disk volume, but using Windows machine. There goes the target into black hole along with the link ;)